Can't Empty Trash With Large Number of Files

Running OS X 10.8.3
I have a very large external drive that had a Time Machine backup on the main partition. At some point, I created a second partition, then started doing backups on the new partition. On Wed, I finally got around to doing some "housecleaning" tasks I'd been putting off. As part of that, I decided to clean up my external drive. So... I moved the old, unused and unwanted Backups.backupdb that used to be the Time Machine backup, and dragged it to the Trash.
Bad idea.
Now I've spent the last 3-4 days trying various strategies to actually empty the trash and reclaim the gig or so of space on my external drive. Initially I just tried to "Empty Trash", but that took about four hours to count up the files just to "prepare to delete" them. After the file counter stopped counting up, and finally started counting down... "Deleting 482,832 files..." "Deleting 482,831 files..." etc, etc... I decided I was on the path to success, so left the machine alone for 12-14 hours.
When I came back, the results were not what I expected. "Deleting -582,032 files..." What the...?
So after leaving that to run for another few hours with no results, I stopped that process. Tried a few other tools like Onyx, TrashIt, etc... No luck.
So finally decided to say the **** with the window manager, pulled up a terminal, and cd'ed to the .Trash directory for my UID on the USB volume and did a rm -rfv Backups.backupdb
While it seemed to run okay for a while, I started getting errors saying "File not found..." and "Invalid file name..." and various other weird things. So now I'm doing a combination of rm -rfing individual directories, and using the finder to rename/cleanup individual Folders when OSX refuses to delete them.
Has anyone else had this weird overflow issue with deleting large numbers of files in 10.8.x? Doesn't seem like things should be this hard...

I'm not sure I understand this bit:
If you're on Leopard 10.5.x, be sure you have the "action" or "gear" icon in your Finder's toolbar (Finder > View > Customize Toolbar). If there's no toolbar, click the lozenge at the upper-right of the Finder window's title bar. If the "gear" icon isn’t in the toolbar, selectView > Customize Toolbar from the menubar.
Then use the Time Machine "Star Wars" display: Enter Time Machine by clicking the Time Machine icon in your Dock or select the TM icon in your Menubar.
And this seems to defeat the whole purpose:
If you delete an entire backup, it will disappear from the Timeline and the "cascade" of Finder windows, but it will not actually delete the backup copy of any item that was present at the time of any remaining backup. Thus you may not gain much space. This is usually fairly quick
I'm trying to reclaim space on a volume that had a time machine backup, but that isn't needed anymore. I'm deleting it so I can get that 1GB+ of space back. Is there some "official" way you're supposed to delete these things where you get your hard drive space back?

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On 1/8/2010 8:56 AM, NovAlf wrote:
>
> Hi!
> Well, I thought there will appear problems. We do have some apps for
> distribution just by copying large amount of files (not large in size)
> to Windows (XP Pro, usually) machines. These is some programs which
> works from directory wo any special need for installation. Happy
> situation for admin. From one side. In ZfD 4.0.1 we did install this app
> on one of machines and then did take snapshot via special app (who
> remember) and did copy file to (Netware) server share, give rights for
> device (~ workstation) and associate it with ws via eDir and ... voila,
> next restart or whatsoever and app was there. Very nice, indeed, I miss
> this!
> So, I tried to make this happen on ZCM 10 (on SLES 11). Did app, sorry,
> bundle, upload files (first time it stuck, second time id accomplish,
> around 7500 files) and did distribution/launch association to ws
> (~device). And ... got errors. Several entries in log as examples
> below.
> Any ideas?
> More thanks, Alar.
> ---
> Error: [1/8/10 2:41:53 PM] BundleManager
> BUNDLE.UnknownExceptionOccurred An Unknown exception occurred trying to
> process task: Novell.Zenworks.AppModule.LaunchException: Exception of
> type 'Novell.Zenworks.AppModule.LaunchException' was thrown.
> at Novell.Zenworks.AppModule.AppActionItem.ProcessAct ion(APP_ACTION
> launchType, ActionContext context, ActionSetResult previousResults)
> ---
> Error: [1/8/10 2:41:54 PM] BundleManager
> ActionMan.FailureProcessingActionException Failed to process action:
> Information for id 51846d2388c028d8c471f1199b965859 has not been cached.
> Did you forget to call CacheContentInfo first?
> ---
>
>

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